Matt Smith works from the gut

When Matt Smith founded what would become SmithGifford six years ago, he envisioned an “advertising collective,” where ad pros can do good work without agency bureaucracy. The only rules? He’d buy lunch, but you had to bring your own chair and roll of toilet paper. Sitting in his Falls Church office, where the chalkboard-painted walls are covered with notes on clients, he talks about his latest achievements.

Your company has grown slowly. Is that intentional?We have an 80 percent win ratio, which is unheard of in the advertising business. When we go into a pitch, generally we really want the pitch, which is always a sign. We don’t go mining for business. If we want a piece of business, they know we want it. And we wait until they’re ready, with planted seeds along the way, and so when we go into a pitch, we’ve lived and breathed that business, and we know that’s the right business for us. [Business has] just been building progressively. Every year there’d be another piece of business. And one of the things that was really interesting is during downturns, we grow. Every time. We started during a downturn.

How are you able to be successful in downturns? Because we keep our overhead extremely low. We renovated the building ourselves. We rent it; we don’t own it. We do everything on the real low end. Like we do our presentations [preparation] in chalk. We feel that what clients are buying is the brains. So we put all our money in the people. All our people are senior. They’re from the top agencies and have some of the top experience in the country.

You’ve recently brought on Susan Kearney, a well-known tech executive with companies such as Oracle and Voxant. How did that come about?[Originally] Susan Kearney hired us. And we just kept building such a positive, such a really cool working relationship. So when she left her company, she said, “you know, you guys really have this amazing opportunity … there’s this gap right now in the marketing world, where there’s ad agencies and there’s Web companies, and the company that can figure out how to do the two is going to make it. That’s the big one.” And we really agreed with her, but we just couldn’t find anybody and when she said, “well, I’m available, let’s do something” it was like, done. And literally, it took about half an hour to make that decision.

Your group is made up of all senior people. How does it work being so top heavy?I think the secret to our success has been focusing on, investing in senior people, that are top people. Only about one or two a year come across your desk, and they come here by mistake. Because it’s not an advertising town. They’ll come in and say, “Well, my wife is here, my husband’s here, I’ve got a friend here.” But you realize that you like living here. It’s really interesting. I don’t feel like we’re that unique of an agency if we were in San Francisco, New York, Minneapolis. But we are unique in Washington.

What makes it unique? We’re creatively owned and run. There are some agencies that are owned creatively. But we’re run creatively. We’re run by emotion and by our gut rather than by a spreadsheet. And it’s really kind of funny because we’ll sit and make decisions in a meeting sometimes about where our numbers are, this is what we’re doing and it will be all gut, and then the accountants will all sit down and analyze things, and we’re usually within 1 percent difference. It’s very funny. It works. It’s a gut business.

Tell me about the new Foundation for the National Archives account. There’s an effort that’s been put forth for seven years now, inviting the public to come in a take advantage of the archives. There’s more to the archives than just the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the original documents. This experience is [to] come in and read the letters. Not write your own history, but interpret your own history. That was the project. How do you bring this to life? How do you brand that from a communications standpoint, and where does it come across? It’s probably one of the most exciting projects we’ve worked on because you’re kind of branding America.

You’ve also just opened a new Richmond office. Why now?The Virginia Lottery was a huge win for the company. We got that a year and half ago. We did that with a huge partnership with [other agencies]. We’re in Richmond once a week doing that, and we’re in Richmond for Brown’s, which has some Richmond dealerships. [With] Richmond, you need to have a presence there. I believe in Richmond as a community. But I believe that they’re two completely different brands.

Advertising competes with another passion of yours: antique classic speedboats. What’s up with your woodyboater.com blog? I wanted to learn about blogging. I’m sitting in meetings talking about it. I have all these tech people presenting this stuff. I thought, you know, I just need to do it. So I found a subject matter that I knew about other than advertising, and it’s a very underserved community. I’m very tight to my brand. It has to be a classic or antique speedboat between the years of 1920 and 1960. They’re under 30 feet. They’re usually made of mahogany or vintage wood. And I have been shocked that there’s been a story every day. I just hit 25,000 page views in six months. Daily it’s about 250 page views, which is nothing. But in a niche, it’s something.

What’s been your biggest accomplishment so far? I’m proud of a couple of things. I was just named “pillar of the community” for the city of Falls Church. That same week we won some Addys. I’ve won awards, but [this time] we won awards, and [at the same time] someone said you’re doing a good job, you’re a good citizen of the community and you’re a nice place to work. And it was the combo punch. You can be a nice guy, and you can help out, and you can still do really good work.